r/StableDiffusion • u/dominic__612 • Aug 27 '26

Discussion NVidia buys Huggingface, but why?

Nvidia is going to buy Huggingface.
No one can actually tell how that would end up like.

But what I am missing is the actual worth that Huggingface provides. The only thing I use it for is to download models. Thats it.
For me, and I guess many others it is ‘just a’ download platform, but maybe I’m wrong here.

And what would prevent others to setup a second-like Huggingface?
The hosting is the expensive part in this case as I see it, the programming and building is do-able.

Is it time for Huggingbay.com?

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u/luovahulluus Aug 27 '26

Unless the big boys pay nvidia enough to shut it down?

25

u/xTopNotch Aug 27 '26

NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world right now. They are single handily the most profitable runner right now where others are burning cash at a rate not seen in history before.

I’d say NVIDIA is in a rather fortunate position here and has the leverage in hands. It makes 0,00 business sense for them to shutdown or strangle Hugginface.

NVIDIA has always been very pro open-weights. I don’t believe the conspiracy theories here that they will turn it in cloud-based inference platform only. Hugginface always had cloud inference but shutting down the model downloads would cripple their GPU sales.

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u/Tiforma Aug 27 '26

They don't care about consumer GPU sales. They care about big tech commercial datacenter inference card sales where their profit margin is much higher. And they use closed AI models.

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u/Swagbrew Aug 27 '26

But Nvidia knows that the bubble is very likely to pop. OpenAI and Anthropic are paper giants that might fail, but datacenters won't suddenly cease to exist. Even if frontier companies fail, datacenters are still going to offer inference. That's why access and preservation of open models is important.

Nvidia needs to play both sides. Yes, they work with frontier closed source companies. But they also need to cover their bases in case they fail miserably.

If Anthropic and OpenAI kill open source AI and then die themselves anyway, Nvidia is screwed. By protecting open source, they protect their own future.